Chapter One
Dear Ma and Dad,
I know this may come as some surprise, but I’ve decided to leave my position at Miss Cleary’s to join the Smith College expedition to France
Dear Ma and Dad,
I hope the boys are well. I have some exciting news to share. I’ve signed up with the Smith College Relief Unit. We’re a group of alumnae who mean to sail for France to bring aid to French villagers. I’ve resigned my position at
Dear Ma and Dad,
You may have read in the news about the Smith College Relief Unit.
Dear Ma,
Would it be all right if I joined you all for dinner next Sunday? I’ll be in town and would very much like to see everyone.
Your loving daughter, Katie
—Miss Katherine Moran, ’11, to her mother, Mrs. Francis Shaughnessy
July 1917
New York
It was a very long way down to the wharf from the deck of the SS Rochambeau.
Kate hadn’t expected the boat to be quite so large. When Mrs. Rutherford had informed them that a packet boat would be carrying the Smith Unit across the Atlantic to France, she had pictured a cross between the Staten Island Ferry and one of the barges that chugged along the East River, something squat and rectangular and human-sized. Not this behemoth of a ship, taller than a town house, giant smokestacks punctuating the sky, crowded with war workers of all description. American ambulance men exchanged war stories with French aviators; journalists jostled aid workers.
Kate felt smaller than small in the midst of it, among all these laughing, shouting groups, families hugging, mothers kissing their sons one last time, champagne corks—of all things!—popping, baskets of fruits and bouquets of flowers piled into the arms of overworked porters, already staggering under piles of trunks and bandboxes and goodness only knows what else. It felt more like Smith graduation than an embarkation.
Well, she hadn’t really expected them to come, had she? Her mother had made her disapproval clear.
“Have you run mad?” was a phrase that didn’t leave itself open to much misinterpretation.
There were lifeboats all around, swung out in the ready position in case of need. On the walls, strongly worded notices forbade such dangerous activities as smoking after blackout once they reached the war zone.
Blackout. War zone. Maybe her mother was right; maybe she had run mad.
Blame the day. That July day that had been hotter than hot, her room in the boardinghouse sweltering, the stupider-than-usual student who had come to her for tutoring in French, the sweat dripping down the back of her neck making her itchy and irritable. At that moment, any place in the world had seemed preferable to where she was, to that horrible, stultifying room that stank of cabbage, the brainless debutantes she had elected to teach in what had been meant to be a temporary position but had become six years of mindless drudgery.
Kate hadn’t cared terribly much about the cause itself. But the idea that someone would pay her way—there were funds, Emmie assured her; it wouldn’t be charity, nothing like charity—to go abroad had seemed too good a chance to miss.
We need you, Kate, Emmie had pleaded, and she’d allowed herself to be persuaded, less from charity than from desperation, desperation to be anywhere other than where she was.
She knew it was madness in her mother’s eyes. Here she was, with a good position, a respectable position—a teacher at a private girls’ school! She would never have to scrub floors and empty chamber pots, as her mother had; never have to wear a white cap and lower her eyes and curtsy to her betters as they swept past her, making dark prints on a floor she had just cleaned.
She had gone off to Smith, and look what had happened.
Her mother hadn’t said that, not precisely, but it was there between them. There in all the things they never said; there in Kate’s clothes, her accent, the way her dad (not her father, always her dad, the man her mother had married when she was nine, kind, always kind, but not her father, never her father) called her “our college girl.” They were proud, yes, but also wary. She’d become a thing apart.
Or maybe she always had been. Kate was the one relic of her mother’s first marriage. You could stick a ring in a drawer, but flesh and blood was harder to hide, especially flesh and blood that was old enough to remember and to mind that her past was being scrubbed away like chalk from a board. The early years, when her father had driven the cart for the brewery and come home smelling of beer and horse to tell long stories in his heavily accented English. And, after that, the lean years, when she and her mother had been all in all to each other, sharing a bed in the one-room apartment where the radiators never worked and the water came out brown, where her mother scrubbed the stairs in exchange for the roof over their heads, where they ate bread and dripping for supper and pretended it was all they wanted. It had been hard, but they had been together. They had been themselves.
But then had come Frank Shaughnessy, member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, one of Brooklyn’s finest, a good man, a steady man, a policeman. Her mother had put cotton gloves over her reddened hands. There had been meat in the stew and sweet-smelling things in the kitchen and four little brothers, one after the other, each louder than the last. Kate had spent more and more time in the local library, reading her way around the shelves as the light shifted with her, the first one there after school, the last one out at dusk.
Her parents might blame Smith for making her a stranger, but it had all happened long before Smith; she’d been a shadow on the edge of their life well before she’d won the scholarship that took her to Northampton.
The one time Kate tried to go back, after Smith, after that summer with Emmie in Newport—well, suffice it to say it hadn’t been a success. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been room for her. They’d made room, even though it was tight in that two-family house with her four brothers all crammed into one room. But they hadn’t known what to do with her or she with them. The men her stepfather had brought home to meet her, boys from the force or the sons of friends, had called her “miss” and treated her like someone’s maiden aunt—or they’d been defensive, belligerent, as though daring her to look down on them.
No. It hadn’t been a success.
That was when Kate had found the job at Miss Cleary’s School for Young Ladies. Which hadn’t been a success either but had at least paid a wage. Because if there was one thing that month at home had taught her, it was that she couldn’t go home again, not really.
But she hadn’t anywhere else to go either.
“Oh, hello! Are you one of us?” A woman bumped into Kate and gave her a long look up and down. Given that she was wearing the same distinctive uniform, Kate rather thought the question answered itself. “You weren’t at the luncheon, were you? I would have known you then. I’m Maud Randolph, class of ’09.”
Kate held out her hand. “Kate Moran, class of ’11.”
“Moran—do you mean Warren?”
“No, Moran.” It was really Moranck, but the gatekeepers at Ellis Island, confounded by her father’s excess of consonants, had, in a stroke, turned him from Jiri Moranck to Jerry Moran. He had made a most unconvincing Jerry Moran. Kate had been only five when he had died, but she could still remember his thick Bohemian accent, the way he pronounced his Bs as Ps.